Skip To Content

ArcGIS Server Administrator REST API

The ArcGIS Server Administrator REST API allows you to administer ArcGIS Server programmatically. This means that you can completely manage your server using any framework that can make HTTP requests.

The API is organized into resources and operations. Resources are entities in ArcGIS Server that contain information and have a well-defined state. Operations act on these resources and update their information or state. Resources and operations are hierarchical and have unique URLs.

This topic is designed to help you browse the API and be more productive in administering ArcGIS Server.

Get started

The hierarchical root of the Administrator API begins with a well-defined URL called as the site URL. Typically, this is accessible at the following location:

https://myserver.mydomain:6443/arcgis/admin

The various resources and operations that are used by the Administrator API are organized hierarchically from the site URL. To access a resource or invoke an operation, you must create a request by doing the following:

  1. Construct a URL to the selected resource or operation as defined in the API Reference .
  2. Provide the relevant parameters in their specified format.
  3. Access the URL over the prescribed HTTP method (typically GET or POST).
Note:

If you are not directly interacting with administrative or REST APIs (for example, using scripts or having a web app firewall configured), you may encounter query limitations. When a query string exceeds 2,048 characters in length, submit the query as a POST request.

The API is stateless, which means that the server does not keep track of transactions from one request to the next. Each request must contain all the information necessary for successful processing. The server processes each request and returns a well-defined response.

Administrator Directory

The Administrator Directory, which is installed with each instance of ArcGIS Server, is a simple HTML interface that allows you to interact with the resources and operations used by the Administrator API. This can be helpful when building scripts for administrative tasks and applications. To access the Administrator Directory, browse to the site URL in a web browser.